Campus Arts

As Harvard’s undergraduate student body has grown ever more diverse, many challenges remain in making the University a fully inclusive institution for all those admitted. According to The Crimson’s annual survey of graduating seniors, students of color at Harvard are less likely to concentrate in the arts and humanities than their white peers. But both faculty and students say that making the arts more open has rarely been so important.

The numbers have been crunched and the results are in. The Harvard Crimson's arts board is proud to present the top 10 films, musics, books, TV shows, campus theater productions, and events, as determined by a Harvard-wide survey.

​“We have statues to pee on,” says one of the characters, a Harvard student, while encouraging another to hurry up in “Little to Do with Anything.” Kirkland Drama Society’s newest production—its annual, very loose adaptation of a Shakespeare farce—is a version of “Much Ado About Nothing,” relocated to Cape Cod and set a week before graduation.

Harvard College promises its undergraduates a liberal arts education, but under its online course catalog, departmental classes are categorized under four distinct headings. The widespread ingrained sense of division between the arts and sciences traces back to popular ideas about brain lateralization: The left hemisphere processes logical information, and the right hemisphere, creative. But what of the students interested in studies that fall within the intersection of disciplines?

​Despite the international acclaim her sculptures receive for their sociopolitical implications, Doris Salcedo identifies solely as a maker of art. “I am an artist,” she said at the press preview of her new exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums. “I am not a political activist; I am not in social justice. I am an artist: That’s all I am and all I want to do.”

Students in Spanish 126: Performing Latinidad process through the yard on Monday as a part of a performance piece exploring experiences of Latinos in the United States. The procession made stops around Harvard Yard for a poetry reading, a coordinated spoken word piece, and other acted performances commenting on anti-Latino discourse in the 2016 presidential election.

“Embodied Absence: Chilean Art of the 1970s Now” is a new exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, but one might encounter pieces from it, such as Luz Donoso’s “Señalamientos con cuerpo estrecho” (Signage with Narrow Body), while taking a walk through Cambridge. This is not the exhibition’s only unconventional aspect—it also largely involves performance art.

The concert, billed as “A special tribute to Steven Stucky,” indeed provided a fitting commemoration to the contemporary American giant while also doing justice to the works of the other composers featured on the program.